Syllabic verse - AbsoluteAstronomy.com

Syllabic verse is a poetic form having a fixed number of syllable

Syllable

A syllable is a unit of organization for a sequence of speech sounds. For example, the word water is composed of two syllables: wa and ter. A syllable is typically made up of a syllable nucleus with optional initial and final margins .Syllables are often considered the phonological "building...

s per line

Line (poetry)

A line is a unit of language into which a poem or play is divided, which operates on principles which are distinct from and not necessarily coincident with grammatical structures, such as the sentence or clauses in sentences...

regardless of the number of stresses that are present. It is common in language

Language

Language may refer either to the specifically human capacity for acquiring and using complex systems of communication, or to a specific instance of such a system of complex communication...

s that are syllable-timed, such as Japanese or modern French

French language

French is a Romance language spoken as a first language in France, the Romandy region in Switzerland, Wallonia and Brussels in Belgium, Monaco, the regions of Quebec and Acadia in Canada, and by various communities elsewhere. Second-language speakers of French are distributed throughout many parts...

or Finnish

Finnish language

Finnish is the language spoken by the majority of the population in Finland Primarily for use by restaurant menus and by ethnic Finns outside Finland. It is one of the two official languages of Finland and an official minority language in Sweden. In Sweden, both standard Finnish and Meänkieli, a...

— as opposed to stress-timed languages such as English

English language

English is a West Germanic language that arose in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England and spread into what was to become south-east Scotland under the influence of the Anglian medieval kingdom of Northumbria...

, in which accentual verse

Accentual verse

Accentual verse has a fixed number of stresses per line or stanza regardless of the number of syllables that are present. It is common in languages that are stress-timed, such as English—as opposed to syllabic verse, which is common in syllable-timed languages, such as French.- Children's poetry...

and accentual-syllabic verse

Accentual-syllabic verse

Accentual-syllabic verse is an extension of accentual verse which fixes both the number of stresses and syllables within a line or stanza. Accentual-syllabic verse is highly regular and therefore easily scannable...

are more common.

Overview

Many European languages have significant syllabic verse traditions, notably Italian, Spanish, French, and the Baltic

Baltic languages

The Baltic languages are a group of related languages belonging to the Balto-Slavic branch of the Indo-European language family and spoken mainly in areas extending east and southeast of the Baltic Sea in Northern Europe...

and Slavic languages

Slavic languages

The Slavic languages , a group of closely related languages of the Slavic peoples and a subgroup of Indo-European languages, have speakers in most of Eastern Europe, in much of the Balkans, in parts of Central Europe, and in the northern part of Asia.-Branches:Scholars traditionally divide Slavic...

. These traditions often permeate both folk and literary verse, and have evolved gradually over hundreds or thousands of years; in a sense the metrical tradition is older than the languages themselves, since it (like the languages) descended from Proto-Indo-European

Proto-Indo-European language

The Proto-Indo-European language is the reconstructed common ancestor of the Indo-European languages, spoken by the Proto-Indo-Europeans...

.

It is often implied -- but it is not true -- that word stress

Stress (linguistics)

In linguistics, stress is the relative emphasis that may be given to certain syllables in a word, or to certain words in a phrase or sentence. The term is also used for similar patterns of phonetic prominence inside syllables. The word accent is sometimes also used with this sense.The stress placed...

plays no part in the syllabic prosody of these languages. Indeed in most of these languages word stress is much less prominent than it is in, say, English or German; nonetheless it is present both in the language and in the meter. Very broadly speaking, syllabic meters in these languages follow the same pattern:

Line length: The line is defined by the number of syllables it contains.
Hemistich length: All but the shortest lines are divided into part-lines (hemistichs); each hemistich also contains a specific number of syllables, and ends with a word-boundary (this means that the hemistich cannot end in the middle of a word).
Hemistich markers: The ends of the hemistichs are marked and contrasted by an obligatory stress: a specific syllable position near the end of each hemistich must be filled by a stressed syllable, and this position typically differs between the first and second hemistich, so that they are audibly distinct.
Marker reinforcement: Often the syllables immediately before or after the obligatory stresses are obligatorily unstressed to further emphasize the stress.
Other structure: Further rules may be imposed, such as additional word-boundary constraints on certain syllabic positions, or allowances for extrametrical syllables; and further interlinear structure may be present (such as rhyme
Rhyme
A rhyme is a repetition of similar sounds in two or more words and is most often used in poetry and songs. The word "rhyme" may also refer to a short poem, such as a rhyming couplet or other brief rhyming poem such as nursery rhymes.-Etymology:...

and stanza
Stanza
In poetry, a stanza is a unit within a larger poem. In modern poetry, the term is often equivalent with strophe; in popular vocal music, a stanza is typically referred to as a "verse"...

).

Linguistically, the most significant exceptions to this pattern are in Latvian

Latvian language

Latvian is the official state language of Latvia. It is also sometimes referred to as Lettish. There are about 1.4 million native Latvian speakers in Latvia and about 150,000 abroad. The Latvian language has a relatively large number of non-native speakers, atypical for a small language...

, Lithuanian

Lithuanian language

Lithuanian is the official state language of Lithuania and is recognized as one of the official languages of the European Union. There are about 2.96 million native Lithuanian speakers in Lithuania and about 170,000 abroad. Lithuanian is a Baltic language, closely related to Latvian, although they...

, and Serbian

Serbian language

Serbian is a form of Serbo-Croatian, a South Slavic language, spoken by Serbs in Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, Croatia and neighbouring countries....

verse which, instead of stress, retain the older quantitative markers; that is, they use long and short syllables at the ends of hemistichs, rather than stressed and unstressed.

Because all of these variables -- line length, number and length of hemistichs, obligatory stress positions, etc. -- differ in detail among various verse traditions; and because the individual languages supply words with different rhythmic characteristics; this basic metrical template is realized with great variety by the languages that use it, and a sequence of syllables that is metrical in one verse tradition will typically not fit in another.

Perception of syllable count

Humans can perceive the number of members in a small set without actually counting them or mentally breaking them into subsets; the upper limit of this ability is estimated at between 5 and 9 units, and this seems to hold true in sequences of audible stimuli (e.g. syllables in a line of verse); so it is no surprise that syllabic hemistichs tend to be very short (typically 4 to 8 syllables), and to be grouped -- and therefore separated from their neighbors -- by markers such as stress, word boundary, and rhyme.

Syllabic verse in English

Syllabic verse in English is quite distinct from that in most other languages, historically, structurally, and perceptually.

Historically, English syllabics have not evolved over time from native practice, but rather are the inventions of literate poets, primarily in the 20th century. Structurally, syllable counts are not bound by tradition, even very long lines are not divided into hemistichs, and the verse exhibits none of the markers usually found in other syllabic meters (with the occasional exception of end-rhyme), relying for their measure solely on total count of syllables in the line. Perceptually "it is very doubtful that verse lines regulated by nothing more than identity of numbers of syllables would be perceived by auditors as verse . . . Further, absent the whole notion of meter as pattern, one may question whether syllabic verse is 'metrical' at all." In English, the difficulty of perceiving even brief isosyllabic lines as rhythmically equivalent is aggravated by the inordinate power of stressed syllables.

In English, unstressed syllables are much weaker and shorter than stressed syllables, and their vowels are often phonetically reduced

Vowel reduction

In phonetics, vowel reduction is any of various changes in the acoustic quality of vowels, which are related to changes in stress, sonority, duration, loudness, articulation, or position in the word , and which are perceived as "weakening"...

. Moreover auditors tend to perceive word stresses to fall at equal intervals in time, making English a perceptually "stress-timed" language; it seems that the same amount of time occurs between stresses. So the conventional patterns of accentual

Accentual verse

and accentual-syllabic

Accentual-syllabic verse

English verse are perceived as regularly rhythmic, whereas to the listener, syllabic verse generally is not distinguishable from free verse.

Thus syllabic technique does not -- in English -- convey a metrical rhythm; rather it is a compositional device: primarily of importance to the author, perhaps noticed by the alert reader, and imperceptible to the hearer.

A number of English-language poets in the Modernist

Modernist poetry

Modernist poetry refers to poetry written between 1890 and 1950 in the tradition of modernist literature in the English language, but the dates of the term depend upon a number of factors, including the nation of origin, the particular school in question, and the biases of the critic setting the...

tradition experimented with syllabic verse. These include Marianne Moore

Marianne Moore

Marianne Moore was an American Modernist poet and writer noted for her irony and wit.- Life :Moore was born in Kirkwood, Missouri, in the manse of the Presbyterian church where her maternal grandfather, John Riddle Warner, served as pastor. She was the daughter of mechanical engineer and inventor...

, Dylan Thomas

Dylan Thomas

Dylan Marlais Thomas was a Welsh poet and writer, Encyclopædia Britannica. Retrieved 11 January 2008. who wrote exclusively in English. In addition to poetry, he wrote short stories and scripts for film and radio, which he often performed himself...

, and Louis Zukofsky

Louis Zukofsky

Louis Zukofsky was an American poet. He was one of the founders and the primary theorist of the Objectivist group of poets and thus an important influence on subsequent generations of poets in America and abroad.-Life:...

. Some more traditional poets have also used syllabics, including Elizabeth Daryush

Elizabeth Daryush

Elizabeth Daryush was an English poet. She was the daughter of Robert Bridges; her maternal grandfather was Alfred Waterhouse. She married Ali Akbar Daryush, whom she had met when he was studying at the University of Oxford and spent some time in Persia; most of her life was spent in Boars Hill,...

and Robert Bridges

Robert Bridges

Robert Seymour Bridges, OM, was a British poet, and poet laureate from 1913 to 1930.-Personal and professional life:...

whose Testament of Beauty is the longest syllabic poem in English.

Examples

Dylan Thomas's "In My Craft Or Sullen Art" is an example of syllabic verse in English: it has seven syllables in each line (except the last), but no consistent stress pattern.

In my craft or sullen art

Exercised in the still night

When only the moon rages

And the lovers lie abed

With all their griefs in their arms,

I labour by singing light

Not for ambition or bread

Or the strut and trade of charms

On the ivory stages

But for the common wages

Of their most secret heart.

Because of its consistent short lines marked with end-rhyme, these lines could conceivably be heard as 7-syllable groups by a listener; however, they would be more likely to be perceived as (usually) 3-stress lines.

Syllabic poetry can also take a stanzaic form, as in Marianne Moore's poem "No Swan So Fine", in which the corresponding lines of each stanza have the same number of syllables. This poem comprises 2 stanzas, each with lines of 7, 8, 6, 8, 8, 5, and 9 syllables respectively. The indented lines rhyme. As in accentual-syllabic verse, there is some flexibility in how one counts syllables. For example, syllables with y- or w-glides may count as one or two syllables depending on the poet's preference. Moore counts "Dahlias" (a y-glide) as 2 syllables, and "flowers" (a w-glide) as 1.

"No water so still as the

dead fountains of Versailles." No swan,

with swart blind look askance

and gondoliering legs, so fine

as the chintz china one with fawn-

brown eyes and toothed gold

collar on to show whose bird it was.

Lodged in the Louis Fifteenth

Candelabrum-tree of cockscomb-

tinted buttons, dahlias,

sea urchins, and everlastings,

it perches on the branching foam

of polished sculptured

flowers--at ease and tall. The king is dead.

Because these lines are longer, irregular, and frequently enjambed

Enjambment

Enjambment or enjambement is the breaking of a syntactic unit by the end of a line or between two verses. It is to be contrasted with end-stopping, where each linguistic unit corresponds with a single line, and caesura, in which the linguistic unit ends mid-line...

("as the / dead fountains"), it is quite clear that the symmetry of syllables is not meant to be audible. Moore's use of end-rhyme is telling. Only 2 lines in each stanza are rhymed: these are emphasized for the reader by indentation, but hidden from the listener by radical enjambment ("fawn- / brown" and "coxcomb- / tinted").

Syllabic verse in French

See French poetry
French poetry
French poetry is a category of French literature. It may include Francophone poetry composed outside France and poetry written in other languages of France.-French prosody and poetics:...

The modern French language does not have a significant stress accent (as English does) or long and short syllables (as Latin does). This means that the French metric line is generally determined by the number of syllables. The most common metric lengths are the ten-syllable line ("décasyllabe"), the eight-syllable line ("octosyllabe") and the twelve-syllable line (the so-called "alexandrine

Alexandrine

An alexandrine is a line of poetic meter comprising 12 syllables. Alexandrines are common in the German literature of the Baroque period and in French poetry of the early modern and modern periods. Drama in English often used alexandrines before Marlowe and Shakespeare, by whom it was supplanted...

").

Special syllable counting rules apply to French poetry. A silent or mute 'e' counts as a syllable before a consonant, but not before a vowel (where "h aspiré" counts as a consonant). When it falls at the end of a line, the mute "e" is hypermetrical (outside the count of syllables).

Overview

Perception of syllable count

Syllabic verse in English

Examples

Syllabic verse in French

See also